Transcript

GET TO KNOW US | JANE STREET

Hi, my name is Nicole. I work as a trader at Jane Street in our London office, and I’ve worked here since the summer of 2019.

WHAT RESPONSIBILITIES DO TRADERS HAVE AT JANE STREET?

So in general, the role of a trader, you can tend to think about it as a bit of a triangle. So on one corner of the triangle you have interacting with live markets. So, you know, looking at various bits of market data, looking at our algorithms and how they’re trading and deciding whether we’re happy with the trading that they’re doing and making adjustments if we’re not. On another corner of this triangle, there’s research. So that’s looking at our trades that we’ve done in the past or investigating new potential trading strategies. And the third corner of this triangle is coding. This will be building new infrastructure or implementing changes to our algorithms. So every trader at Jane Street falls somewhere on this triangle. And you know, if you’re at the various different corners of the triangle, your roles can be pretty different. I personally do much more interacting with live markets, a bit of research and considerably less coding. It just depends on what you enjoy and what you’re better at. I tend to like interacting with the live markets. I think that it’s dynamic and exciting and I like being able to see my changes make a difference pretty quickly.

WHAT COURSEWORK HELPED PREPARE YOU FOR YOUR JOB AT JANE STREET?

At university I studied maths. It was more kind of the skills that you learn doing a degree like maths or another quantitative degree that help you here at Jane Street. The problem solving and analytical skills which I learned have been really useful, and are really useful for thinking about the world in the way that we like to think about the world and about trading here at Jane Street.

HOW WILL INTERNS COLLABORATE WITH FULL TIMERS DURING THE INTERNSHIP?

We have a bunch of mock trading activities which you can get involved in and a bunch of more extended mock trading scenarios where we try to simulate real-life trading situations. For the vast majority of these activities, you get to work in a team and even for projects which you work on, you’re collaborating very closely with a mentor. I think it really reflects how we like to work at Jane Street. The vast majority of our work is collaborative and working with other people. I spend almost my entire day talking to a bunch of other people.

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO SOMEONE PREPARING FOR A JANE STREET INTERVIEW?

I think the main piece of advice that I would give to people who are interviewing here is just to be interested and curious in the work that we do and to try and collaborate with your interviewers. Really in interviews, we’re just trying to find people who we’d like to work with and who we think will succeed at Jane Street because we have such a heavy emphasis on collaborating and trying to work together to solve problems. Trying to show your interviewer that you want to work with them and you want to solve these problems is a really valuable skill to have. I’d also say it’s really important to make sure you read all of the materials that we send to you before and during your interviews and to read up on all the material that’s on the website. We have a bunch of mock interviews and various other helpful tips on the website. And so if I were interviewing or if I had friends who were interviewing, I’d definitely tell them to take a look at that.

WHAT TYPE OF TRAINING DO NEW TRADERS GO THROUGH?

One very important part of the training that new traders tend to go through is our coding bootcamps. One of the first things that you’ll tend to do is go through OCaml boot camp and a Python boot camp. A lot of our traders come in with some coding background, but a lot of people have done very little coding in the past and almost no one has done any coding in OCaml. OCaml is a language which we use at Jane Street, but isn’t very widely used outside of Jane Street, so don’t worry if you haven’t done it before or haven’t even heard of the language.

HOW IS WORKING AT JANE STREET DIFFERENT FROM WHAT YOU EXPECTED?

For me, at least, working at Jane Street honestly really feels a lot like sitting in a maths department, looking through your problems that you’re trying to solve and working with your friends to try and solve the most difficult ones. Obviously, the different thing about working at Jane Street is that the problems don’t have really nice and tidy solutions, but that makes it really important to work alongside people and try and find the best solutions that you can.